Back to school! It’s never easy to jump into a new semester after a year-long leave, but it’s made easy for me because I get to teach two new courses related to my research. English 516 (English Grammar in Use) will be taught as a class on discourse syntax (covering grammar in discourse and grammar of discourse), based on my recent textbook, and English 412 (Bad Grammar and Metalinguistic Awareness) addresses the vexed relationship between prescriptive and descriptive grammar and the impact prescriptive approaches have on language use and linguistic communities (the topic of my current book project). I’m looking forward to the research projects students will design for one course and the community project they’ll come up with for the other. Both courses prioritize weekly engagement over big assignments, and research projects end with a poster presentation. Graduate students will be encouraged to submit their project to the 2024 Prescriptivism Conference in Aix-en-Provence.
